After Upgrading to Ubuntu 18.04 build-essential, g++, gcc & cpp held broken packages

Question

After Upgrading to Ubuntu 18.04 from 16.04 build-essential, g++, gcc & cpp E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 build-essential : Depends: gcc (>= 4:7.2) but it is not going to be installed
                   Depends: g++ (>= 4:7.2) but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.


$ sudo apt-get install gcc
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 gcc : Depends: gcc-7 (>= 7.3.0-12~) but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

The same type of output for g++ & cpp

How to fix this?

Solution 1

I've encountered the same - on Ubuntu 16.04 I had the Toolchain Test Builds PPA for gcc and clang builds, including gcc-7. During the upgrade to 18.04, 3rd party repositories were disabled by the installation process, with this PPA included.

To fix this, try (re?)adding the toolchain PPA to your apt sources list:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-toolchain-r/test
sudo apt-get update

Then, when installing build-essential, it should successfully pick gcc-7 from the toolchain PPA.

Solution 2

I had the same issue, but apparently I had used a different PPA when I installed those tools.

For me I fixed it with:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jonathonf/gcc

Comments

[warsong]

I'm getting this same error now (2018/12/10), even though I've removed all 3rd party PPAs.

[void.pointer]

This didn't work for me, it still says gcc-7 cannot be found.

[warsong]

this doesn't work for me either, same error as void.pointer

[Trect]

Does not work for me either. I upgraded from 14.04 to 16.04

[Trect]

This did not solve the problem. The problem persists